What Western historians knew about Byzantine history at any given point in the middle ages provides a rough and ready guide to the standing of Byzantium in the West. It is an approach that requires refinement. It will be more effective if the chronological span is reduced in such a way as to cover significant developments in relations between Byzantium and the West. It equally makes sense to take a group of historians, who will reflect the interests of a particular area or people. On this occasion that group is self-selecting. It comes in the shape of the Norman historians from William of Jumièges toWilliam of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis; fromWilliam of Apulia to the anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum. One of the advantages of such a selection is that their histories straddle the great divide of the first crusade, which proved to be a watershed in Byzantium’s relations with the West. They also straddle another divide: that between the northern and the Mediterranean lands of the medieval West. But this immediately prompts a question: in the light of the question mark that hangs over the Norman identity, did these ‘Norman’ historians constitute a distinct group? What is it that unites them? Paradoxically, it is the charge brought against them that they were artificially attempting to create a Norman identity. This has been levelled at Orderic Vitalis, who spent much of his life in the Norman monastery of St Evroul; it has equally been made against southern Italian historians, such as Amato of Monte Cassino and Godfrey of Malaterra. However weakly based this Norman identity may have been, the historians themselves saw links and common features that united Normans wherever they might be settled. The ‘Norman historians’ of the south were all too aware of their northern origins, while those who stayed behind took an interest in the activities of their compatriots in southern Italy and Sicily. The circumstances of these conquests in the south alerted the ‘Norman historians’ to the importance of Byzantium, which they might otherwise have been able to ignore.

But the framework they were operating in was different from that existing earlier. To illustrate this, I shall take as a starting point an Italian historian of the tenth century, Liutprand of Cremona (c.920–c.972).